Sunday, April 12, 2009

Hello...God...What now? Day 4

...It was clear that I needed to get ready...that I needed to study. But what exactly did that mean?

I had been working with a friend of mine at that time doing electrical work. He had just recently decided to start his own company and he needed someone to help him out. An apprentice type I guess you could say and I was just that. I knew how to turn a wrench but I was pretty green when it came to doing electrical work. Of course I found out pretty quickly why he needed someone like me. My skinny bag of bones fit very well up in dark attics and down in dank...dusty crawl spaces. I was learning a lot of neat and useful things but it was not the going in the direction that I felt that God was leading me. And that's the funny thing...God...I know that it was you that was speaking to me that day on the 605 freeway...But where do I go now? What's next?

I guess in some sense I was expecting something more supernatural. Not necessarily a Damascus road experience but a detailed itinerary would have been nice. 8) And so without any further explicit direction from God I figured it wouldn't hurt to at least move in the direction of some kind of formal education. And so I enrolled in a summer session, public speaking class at Long Beach City College. I figured if God was going to use me, there was probably a pretty good chance that some form of public speaking would be involved. And with a big mouth like mine, I figured it certainly couldn't hurt to learn how to use it more effectively.

During my third semester at Long Beach City College I started working for Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, at their radio station, K-Wave 107.9. What a cool opportunity this turned out to be. Not only was I getting to use some of the skills that I had been studying for in school but I also got to get first hand experience working in ministry in a mega-church environment. Initially I was hired to do part-time programming and learn about the engineering aspects of the station with Marcos O'Rourke. The second part of that job description never really happened. However two weeks into working there I actually got my first opportunity to be on-air. What a blast that was and yet it was the most nerve-wracking experience of my life. My heart was beating so hard and so fast...I'd swear you could hear it in the recording we made.

That following week I came in to train on one of the weekend overnight shifts with Brian Perez. The weekend overnights is where they like to train people how to be on air personalities. Which is understandable...Mistakes seem to matter the least in the middle of the night. 8) And at first they were many. But over time the butterflies go away and the mistakes come less frequently. Not that you ever become error free in radio but learning how to recover from those mistakes is the key. Within a month of working there I had my own weekend overnight shift.

But as this door had opened for me another one closed quite abruptly...

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